


Halloween

by earlgreytea68



Category: the girl who never was
Genre: Gen, Halloween, Otherworld
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-01
Updated: 2014-11-01
Packaged: 2018-02-23 10:56:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2545034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreytea68/pseuds/earlgreytea68
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will celebrates in Salem, before the events of THE GIRL WHO NEVER WAS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Halloween

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween, everyone!

Will Blaxton took a step back and regarded the sign above his doorway with satisfaction. 

Which was, of course, when Sarah said, “You’ve spelling it wrong. You know that, right?” 

“Suddenly you’re particular about spelling?” Will said with a sigh. “When you spell your last name five or six different ways at last count?” 

“That’s just intelligence,” said Sarah. “Keep your name out of the history books as much as you can. You know all about that.” 

“You were hanged as a witch,” Will reminded her. “You’re very much in the history books.” 

“I like a little recognition,” Sarah sniffed. “We can’t all of us be ghosts like you. It’s w-i-t-c-h.” 

“I know how to spell ‘witch.’”

“Well, you’ve spelled it w-h-i-c-h there.” 

“That’s intentional.” 

Sarah looked at the sign for a long moment. “The Salem Which Museum,” she said, finally. 

“The Salem Which Museum?” Will corrected her, giving it its proper interrogatory title. 

“And what’s it supposed to be.” 

“Whatever you like. This place is crowded with witch museums. I wanted a museum to attract the right sort of people. The sort of people who are curious about Salem. Who don’t just want to be told a faerie tale.” 

Sarah looked out over the throngs of people on the streets, many of them dressed in some recognizable form in the pop culture guise of “witch.” None of them were paying any attention to the Salem Which Museum because none of them were supernatural enough to see it. 

Sarah said, “It wasn’t just a faerie tale.” 

“Might as well be by this time,” said Will. “And you know as well as I do that it’s only the faerie tales that are true in the end. To what do I owe the honor of this visit? I thought you were laying low after the Lucretia Brown thing.” 

Sarah rolled her eyes. “That was over a century ago.” 

Will frowned, thinking. “Was it? I thought that was just the other day.” 

“You’re keeping the wrong sort of time,” Sarah told him. 

“Or the right sort,” Will defended himself, and conjured up a pretty chrysanthemum for his doorstep. 

“I thought you might want to take place in a little tour we’re doing.” 

Will looked from the chrysanthemum to Sarah. She was dressed goth punk these days, apparently. Sarah went through phases. Last time Will had seen her, he was pretty sure she’d been dressed as Marie Antoinette. Will said, “A tour of what?” 

“The real Salem. The Salem these people never get to see.” Sarah gestured at the tourists. 

Will crossed his arms. “You’re going to show people real witchcraft? Because that turned out so well last time?” 

“No one got hurt in the end, did they?” Sarah sniffed. “And it allowed us to hide in plain sight, and you’ve got to admit that’s useful. We just think someone should tell the truth every once in a while. This Halloween falls on a full moon. The timing seems right.” 

“Telling the truth is always dangerous,” said Will. “Words have power, you know that.” 

“Which is why we shouldn’t forget which of our stories are the right ones,” Sarah told him, wisely. “Stop by the store if you’re in.” 

***

Sarah Osborne / Osbourne / Osburne / Osborn’s shop was called Goody Osburn’s, because Sarah was never going to let go the fact that that guy had written about her in that play that one time. Off-stage, Will was endlessly reminding her, but Sarah said he didn’t show up in any plays, and Will tried to tell her that was how he liked it but he still didn’t think Sarah had to be so showy with how she’d been immortalized. 

Will went to the shop in the witching hour, because that was the only time witches did anything. From the outside, it was dark and closed, all shut up, but Will touched the doorknob and the deadbolt flew back for him and Will walked inside. The door closed and re-bolted itself, and Will walked through the crowded aisles of fake cauldrons and fake amulets and fake broomsticks and fake potions to the back, where the real stuff was kept. 

And where a meeting of all of Salem’s current witch population was going on. They were chattering excitedly to each other, because they didn’t get together very often, because the energy of a lot of witches all in one place tended to attract the attention of even the normally oblivious humans. 

“Will!” Tituba exclaimed, catching sight of him and coming up to him. “We don’t see you around much!” 

“Will’s here all the time,” Sarah said, also coming up to them. “He just lays low.” 

“We should all be laying low,” Will said. “We’re at war.” 

“We’ve been at war forever,” Sarah said. “We’ve got to live a little sometimes.” 

Will sighed. 

“We can’t all be all work and no play like you, Will,” said Tituba. 

Will sighed again. 

Sarah called the meeting to order and explained her plan: they would offer a tour. The Real Salem Witchcraft Tour. Halloween night, at 11 pm, nudging up against the magic hour of midnight. And they would tell the truth. Nothing but the truth. 

“I don’t know,” said Rebecca Nurse from the front of the room. “Isn’t it dangerous? Look what happened last time we told the truth.” 

“This isn’t a world that believes in magic anymore,” Sarah said. “Tell them, Will. They won’t even believe us.” 

“She’s right,” Will said, reluctantly. “They’ve forgotten everything they ever knew about where this place came from. They hear stories of truth and dismiss them as fiction.” 

“Which is why it’s even more important to tell the truth,” Sarah said, firmly. “To give the words back their power. You know I’m right.” Sarah was speaking to all of them, but she was looking right at Will. 

***

Salem on Halloween night was an exhausting mob of people and Will had always hated it. Well. Not always. In the beginning, when Salem was young and new and not a tourist destination for those playing at being witches, Salem on Halloween had been the place to be for those supernatural beings stuck in the Thisworld. They had gathered there, maintained their ties, strengthened their alliances. As the humans had begun to take over Salem, had begun to take over more and more of the traditional routes of supernatural interaction, Will acknowledged they had lost that. The Thisworld was now composed of a number of strictly separated groups of supernatural beings who viewed each other with suspicion. Will thought of the war he was trying to prepare for and worried. 

“Will,” Sarah said, when Will arrived in front of her store. It was a cold night, but that hadn’t stopped the circle of humans milling around, waiting to be told the true story of witchcraft in Salem. “I really wasn’t sure you’d come.” 

“You might be right,” Will admitted. “It might be that the true words have begun to lose their power, because we’ve begun to forget what’s true.” 

Sarah smiled at him. And then she divided up the humans that had arrived and gave a little knot of them to Will. 

Will took them all over Salem’s old town, and he told them the stories he knew. Which was all of them, because nothing had ever happened in this land without Will Blaxton’s involvement, even if he stayed out of the history books. He told them the truth. 

The humans didn’t look impressed. 

One of them said, “So you’re saying not a single person died during the Salem Witch Trials?” 

“Not a single one,” Will confirmed. “They were witches. You can’t kill a witch in the usual ways.” Surely this was obvious?

“Well, that’s stupid,” said another human. “That’s a stupid story.” 

Will flickered a frown. “It’s the truth.” 

“It’s not exactly spooky, though, is it?” said another one. “It’s Halloween in Salem. You’re supposed to be telling us ghost stories.” 

“Don’t they haunt the town, the witches’ souls, cursing the people of Salem forevermore?” asked an eager young man. 

“They haunt the town,” Will informed all of them dryly, “curing the people of Salem by selling them overpriced fake magical artifacts.” 

There was a general outcry over this. 

“Fine,” Will snapped. “You want to hear a terrifying story? A story that will keep you up at nights? This world is threatened daily by a vast power in another realm. One that is waiting to swoop in here and steal your life forces, feed upon your energy, destroy every piece of you and your history and your civilization that you would try to cling to. To the Otherworld, you are nothing but a blink of an eye, a footnote they would barely register as they wiped you out of existence, off the page, as they deleted every word you might ever say to tell your stories, until even the stories themselves would be forgotten. And once you forget the stories, then you have never existed, have you?” 

His knot of humans stared at him. 

***

No one ever came to the Salem Which Museum, so the door opening startled Will. 

Unless it was Selkie. Unless everything was already—

It was Sarah. She dropped some old coins on the table in the front room and said, “Like what you’ve done with the place.” 

“I haven’t done anything,” Will pointed out. 

“Yes,” she said. “Very classic and understated.” She dropped onto the very old couch and then said, “Hey, is this Giles Corey’s couch?” 

“Yeah, he gave it to me. Said he needed to start anew. You know how he was.” 

“Dead melodramatic,” Sarah agreed. “So I heard you terrified your tour group.” 

“I told them the truth,” Will said, irritated. “They didn’t want to hear that everyone survived the witch hunts. Can you imagine? They wanted to hear that innocent people died. That’s the story they wanted to hear.” 

“Because they’ve stopped feeling the power of those words. They’ve heard them so many times, they’ve stopped realizing that it’s a story they’re theoretically telling about real people who were tortured and died for no reason. They put on pointed hats and carry brooms and they’re disconnected from the power of the story they’re telling. It’s why we have to keep telling it.” 

“I know,” Will said, and sighed and sat on the room’s other chair. 

Sarah said, after a moment, “Is it true? What you told the tour group? About the Seelies waiting to get in?”

Will looked at her in surprise. “You know we’re at war.”

“I know you keep saying that. For as long as I can remember. For the centuries or few seconds we’ve been here. But nothing ever happens. And I don’t know how much longer your words on that front will have power.” 

Will looked around the room and said, “We’re at war. You’d better hope it stays like this as long as it possibly can. Because I don’t know if I can keep the Seelies out forever.” 

“But you have a plan, don’t you?” Sarah’s eyes were sharp on him. “That’s the rumor, anyway. Will Blaxton always has a plan. You planned this whole thing out.” 

“I have a plan,” Will confirmed. “My plan depends on a teenager in Boston, so I’m sure it’s all going to work out perfectly well.” He smiled with a confidence he didn’t feel. 

“A Boston teenager and a Le Fay, if those words are true,” said Sarah. “Making alliances with faeries and humans.” 

“Doing what I can,” said Will, and he knew his smile was sad now, and he looked around the room with fondness, as if he was already going to have to say good-bye to it. 

“It’ll all be okay,” said Sarah, after a moment of silence. 

“Will it?” said Will. 

“You’ve got to see the words with conviction, Will, or they’ll lose their power,” said Sarah. 

Will nodded and said, “It’ll all be okay.” The sound of them felt hollow in the air.


End file.
